Each week Carbon County Sheriff Jeff Wood comes into the radio stations to speak about what his department is up to or gives the community safety tips. However, this week’s update had more of a serious tone regarding the non-profit organization, Utah Harm Reduction Coalition.
The Utah Harm Reduction Coalition claims to be Utah’s first legal syringe exchange program. To better understand exactly what this organization is purposing to our area the public first needs to understand Utah’s Paraphernalia Act. “So, the Utah Legislators passed a law in 2016 that allows for needle exchanges to take place in the state of Utah. Basically, the law says they can exchange needles for needles or syringes for syringes but that is all,” stated Wood. “The people that are allowed to do it are your local health department, your local mental health authority or Division of Human Services can do it as government entities, and for profit and non-profit organization can do it as well.” A needle exchange program is proven to be extremely beneficial in large urban areas where they have a large outbreak of HIV and/or Hepatitis C, with services available at a stationary location and this is not the case for UHRC.
UHRC is a non-profit organization, mobile entity that would allow individuals to exchange their needles and/or syringes. When they first came to the area to talk about their needle exchange, that was what it was going to be, just a needles exchange only. Now they are back peddling and offering a lot more to addicts than what they originally proposed. Wood has some legitimate concerns about the grant based program, “I have a lot of concerns about this program, but one of the main concerns I have is they also give out what they call The Works. The Works is a complete kit to use heroin; it comes with a tourniquet, it comes with a cooker to cook the heroin down, it comes with a powder substance to add to the heroin, it comes with cotton balls to use for filters for when they inject it. It’s clearly a violation of paraphernalia act,” stated Wood. All the items that the coalition is willing to handout to addicts is not going to be beneficial at all, it will only compound the current problem of tossing needles around public areas to avoid the evidence of the crime.
The Utah Paraphernalia Act says if you give out all these items with the knowledge that it is for drug use only, that’s illegal. It’s a class A misdemeanor if you give it to an adult and it’s a third-degree felony if you give it to anyone under the age of 18 years old.
A current program that has been established in the county jail, Wood explains further, “Now we have done some stuff in the jail that I feel is a better approach, to this we’ve used Naltrexone, which is a pill that people can take every day, it’s an opiate blocker. We’ve done a test on some of our Drug Court folks, we’ve used 18 of them since August of last year and they have not relapsed, they haven’t used, they don’t shoot heroin no more and it’s a good thing. It costs them about a $1.00 a day to take this pill and they pay for it themselves.” This is a much better approach for individuals who want to get better, to become sober and live a life free of addiction.
Community members that have concerns and would like to voice their opinions are urge to do so by speaking with their local legislators, because in October the needle exchange programs will be reevaluated in October as to whether they were helpful or not.